Dune

Dune has
become my signature piece, germinating over a long period. Science
fiction, legend and ancient earth history are very powerful imagination-tweekers
that suggest new forms for microtonal music. Like many fans of
Frank Herbert's powerful Dune novels, I was disappointed with
the movie.
I thought 'well, I'll take care of that,' and wrote a bassoon solo that
does it up just fine. And I'm pleased to say that it's been very
well received by the bassoon world. Perhaps it will be, as one
reviewer put it, the next contemporary music competition piece for
bassoon.

Although
each section of Dune has its own program reference, it's not necessary
to know it. There's always more for anyone who's curious.
People say that the brilliance of Mozart is that there is a level accessible
to everyone, that every stripe of person will find a deeper level or
aspect to speak to them directly. I'd like to feel that the same
is true here. In the score I suggest that you can completely
disregard the Frank Herbert connection and just think of Dune as reflecting
the sand dunes which the wind is constantly shaping.

For
instance, the opening of Dune is a physical swirling of the instrument
that creates a very powerful acoustic effect, resolving into a multiphonic,
thick, grainy chord sound. On the planet Arakis, a desert world,
giant worms burrow beneath the sand. Sensitive to physical movement,
they eventually pop their heads up and move towards whatever is moving.
I'm being quite programmatic in the beginning of Dune. The next
section is a theme and variations returning to the novel's father and
son (after all, what's more of a variation than a son to a father?).
The Tleilaxu,
for instance, are shape shifters. In this section
I even change the shape of the bassoon with no pause, screwing the bell
off the top of the bassoon, then screwing the bocal out of the bassoon,
playing on the still-connected reed, popping the end of the bocal into
the bell and then using my hands to create a wah-wah sound - which is
the Tleilaxu all over. The next section is the Ixians. They
were technocrats and so everything is done exclusively with keys, just
the sound of the percussion of the bassoon.

Next, we
have the Fremen, represented by equal divisions of the octave: two,
three, four, five, improvising. Finally, the Spice, which drove the Fremen towards
the next day, when they would gather more spice from the worm. Spice
is all multiphonics, just a joyous series of chords, an almost bluesy,
ecstatic dance.